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Hubble and Earth

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Hubble and Earth

Photograph courtesy NASA

Space shuttle Columbia and the Hubble Space Telescope drift 360 miles (579 kilometers) over the Earth's surface during a servicing mission in March 2002. During the mission, astronauts installed a new refrigeration system in Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), which had been inactive since 1999, when it depleted the nitrogen ice that had cooled it since 1997.